There is certainly no ground for wondering that the Sorbonne, in proceeding against the _Vie tres-horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel,_ should have described it as "an obscene tale;" and the whole part of Panurge, the brilliant talker of the tale, "Take him for all in all the best boy in the world," fully justifies the Sorbonne.

But, by way of striking contrast, at the same time that the works of Rabelais attest the irregularity of men's lives and minds, they also reveal the great travail that is going on and the great progress that has already been made in the intellectual condition of his day, in the influence of natural and legitimate feelings, and in the appreciation of men's mutual rights and duties.
Sixty-two years ago M.Guizot published, in a periodical collection entitled _Annales de l'Education,_ a Study of Rabelais' ideas compared with the practice and routine of his day in respect of Education; an important question in the sixteenth as it is in the nineteenth century.
It will be well to quote here from that Study certain fragments which will give some notion of what new ideas and tendencies were making their way into the social life of France, and were coincident with that great religious and political ferment which was destined to reach bursting-point in the reign of Francis I., and to influence for nearly a century the fortunes of France.
"It was no easy matter," were the words used by M.Guizot in 1811, "to speak reasonably about education at the time when Rabelais wrote.

There was then no idea of home-education and the means of rendering it practicable.

As to public education, there was no extensive range and nothing really useful to the community in the instruction received by children at college; no justice and no humanity in the treatment they experienced; a fruitless and ridiculously prolonged study of words succeeded by a no less fruitless study of interminable subtilties, and all this fruitless knowledge driven into the brains of children by help of chastisements, blows, and that barbarous severity which seems to regard the _Compelle intrare_ as the principal law and object of instruction.

How proceed, in such a state of things, to conceive a plan of liberal, gentle, and reasonable education?
Rabelais, in his book, had begun by avoiding the danger of directly shocking received ideas; by transporting both himself and his heroes to the regions of imagination and extravagance he had set himself at liberty to bring them up in quite a different fashion than that of his times; the rectors of colleges could not pretend that Pantagruel, who was hardly born before he sucked down at every meal the milk of four thousand six hundred cows, and for whose first shirt there had been cut nine hundred ells of Chatellerault linen, was a portrait of any of the little boys who trembled at their ferules.
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